Storytelling Festival for Kids

The family edition of our popular storytelling festival

Each year The Ark revives the oldest of all the arts with our February Storytelling Festival, featuring talespinners from far and wide. This year's tellers are New Hampshire-born Willy Claflin, Hungary's Zalka Csenge Virág, and Kalamazoo's Alison Downey. Sunday's program features kid-oriented stories from our 2012 Storytelling Festival artists. The Ark's 25th annual Storytelling Festival is a collaboration with the Ann Arbor Storytellers' Guild.

Willy Claflin was born before television. The only child of shy eccentric parents, he grew up in the woods of New Hampshire where he spent his childhood day dreaming and impersonating wild life. In boarding school, he found out he was funny. Willy is a now a master storyteller, mostly for adults, but his kid fans are still really important. He tells original and traditional stories. He sings his own songs, plus 1,032 eerie ballads from the British Isles and Appalachia-and a lot of blues and rock and roll. He is also the speaking mouth person for Maynard Moose, another famous storyteller and kids' author. Zalka Csenge Virág, also known as The Multicolored Lady, is Hungary's first international storyteller. She travels the world, sharing Hungarian folktales with her audiences (in English, Spanish and Hungarian), and takes all the stories she learns back home to Hungary. She represented Hungary at the Kids' Euro Festival in Washington DC, telling Hungarian folktales in local schools, museums, and the Kennedy Center. Allison Downey can make an audience in a 500-seat theatre feel like they're in her living room. "Dynamic, energetic, intimate, masterful, genuine, honest, humorous, hilarious, charismatic"-these are just a few of the descriptors chosen by critics and audiences to describe Allison's performances. Alison's storytelling career has been taking off- she appeared in the Moth Mainstage production at the Power Center during the 2011 Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

More information at the Ann Arbor Storytellers' Guild website